“Sophia,” I murmur, and somehow everything hurts even worse. She’s out there, waiting for a man who might already be gone. My Cherry-red. The only woman I’ve ever been inside. The only one who ever made me feel human.
I close my eyes, and if I try really, really hard, I can still hear her laugh. I can still feel arms around my neck for the first time—the first time I’ve ever allowed someone touch me there willingly. Her hands, her fingers, so fucking soft and warm.
God, I need her.
I need her voice. Her face, her smile. Her body. Feel the way her tight walls clench around my cock like she wants to keep me buried inside her forever. I want to crawl through the dark and find her. I want to pin her down and fuck her until the memory of this room disappears. I want to wrap my bloody, ruined hands around her throat while I drive into her deep and make her screamNazarethuntil her voice breaks. I want to fill her with so much of my cum that it leaks out of her for days. I want to own her so completelythat even if I die down here, some part of me stays alive inside her body.
I need her so fucking badly it feels like another kind of death. There is no part of me able to move, no feeling except this solid weight of loss and want, heavier than any chain.
I’m nothing.
I’m every bone I’ve broken.
I’m every life I’ve taken.
But I’m nothing.
"There he is," I hear Valeria say softly. Like she's been waiting for exactly this. Me on the floor with nothing left. This is the destination she's been navigating toward all along.
Then something small slides through the slot and hits the floor right in front of my face.
A little plastic bag. White powder. Not much. Just enough.
The sight of it reminds me how badly I need it, the craving a living blade now, carving through muscle and bone and whatever’s left of my soul.
White powder means relief.
White powder means escape. Salvation and hell and the gentle hush of nothing.
My bodylungesfor it before my mind can catch up, bloody fingers shaking so violently I almost drop it.
I stare at it. Look back up at Valeria’s eyes in the slot.
“Fuck you,” I whisper, voice raw and broken.
She waits, patient as ever.
Mary’s blood-soaked hair. Sophia’s green eyes. The basement when I was fourteen. The men who taught meexactly what my pretty face was good for while Valeria watched.
The nights I begged for it to stop and learned that begging only made it worse.
I tear the bag open with my teeth, tell myself just this once. Just this fucking once.
Just until everything’s numb.
I press my face to the floor and inhale.
2
SOPHIA
Three weeks. Twenty-one days of waking up in a country that isn't mine, in a bed that isn't mine, reaching across cold sheets for a man who isn't there.
Some mornings, the emotional ache comes first—raw, hollow, a quiet devastation that settles behind my ribs like a bruise that never fades. I miss the weight of his silence in the room, the way he watched me like I was the only thing worth seeing in a world that had tried to break him. I miss the rare, devastating softness he showed only to me, the way his fingers would trace my back like he was memorizing scripture.
But then the missing shifts, deepens, turns carnal. It sinks lower, curling hot and insistent between my thighs, because my body doesn’t understand absence the way my heart does. It only remembers what it felt like to be owned by him.
The absence is a living thing now. It curls against myspine when I wake, heavy and possessive, whispering that the space beside me should be filled with the solid heat of Reth’s body, the low rumble of his breath against my neck, the hands that would drag me closer like I belonged there.
